netmeg - 2:01 pm on Apr 10, 2012 (gmt 0)

First off, I don't really believe in zombie (human) traffic or traffic shaping; I've never seen it across 250+ sites, some with high traffic, and I can't think of a motive behind it. I can't speak to traffic shaping.

However, for those of you reporting high levels of traffic that does not engage with your site (particularly foreign traffic) does this traffic actually show as being referred from Google?

The reason I ask is that one of my sites has been zombie-BOTTED for going on two months now. A growing number of others of us have also noticed this (it's outlined here in the Analytics forum [webmasterworld.com...] and this is not like most zombie bot attacks, in that it absolutely looks like human browser traffic. But it's being logged as direct traffic - there is no referrer. And it all shows as IE on some form of Windows.

So you might want to look closely at your log files and analytics. Just in case. I've seen at least three cases in the past ten days where someone didn't even realize they were getting this kind of traffic till they read my blog post on it, and went and looked.

Just puttin' that out there.

(petehall - you can absolutely discern your mobile traffic with your log files or your analytics or stats programs - iPhones show their operating system and their screen resolution (generally 320 x 480 or something close to that)

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 2:00 am (utc) on Apr 11, 2012]
[edit reason] fixed link [/edit]